Archive for September, 2014

Omar Gonzalez needed to see the president. To tell him “the atmosphere is collapsing.” And urge the president to get the Word on this, out to the People.

But Omar Gonzalez was not a person whose pockets were groaning with gold. And so he had no chance to see the president.

Because that’s just the way it is.

Omar Gonzalez in the 1990s—in Clintontime—had made the fatal mistake of enlisting in the United States military. And so, as is its wont with every soul that comes its way, the military then transformed Omar Gonzalez into a serial killer.

For the next 18 years Omar Gonzalez dutifully wandered the world, hither and yon, looking for people he was told by the US military should be killed. And he then killed them.

Until Omar Gonzalez’ mind, it melted. So that the military, which was responsible for melting his mind, vomited him back into the world. So that, when Omar Gonzalez inevitably ran amok, it would be as a civilian, rather than a soldier. And the military could say: hey, not our problem.

And Omar Gonzalez, back in the states, mind melted, he proceeded to live in a car. Wherein, after a year or so, he came to Understand the Reality of the atmosphere-collapse. And determined he Must pass this fearful Wisdom on to the president. So, in turn, the People, would Know.

So Omar Gonzalez loped across the White House lawn. To get to the president. To plead with the president to tell the people that the atmosphere is collapsing.

He made it into the president’s residence, but there he was tackled by many burly men.

Omar Gonzalez is now in a jail. Where he is accused of many Crimes. By doberman prosecutors who want him to be confined to a cage for many decades. Because it is simply Not Permitted. To lope across the White House lawn. To see the president. Even on a matter as grave as the collapse of the atmosphere. Only if your pockets are groaning with gold, may you see the president. Otherwise, you must go to the dungeon.

And, lo, there is now a great foaming, from the blabbering class of the nation. Ceaseless ululation and garment-rending, demanding to know why in the sam-hell-hill Omar Gonzalez did not have his brains blown out, there on the White House lawn, by the sharpshooters stationed 24/7 on the roof of the residence, or have his throat ripped out, by the avid rabid dogs, that ceaselessly patrol the premises, seeking to hamstring gut throat-rip, any Non-Ordinary interloper.

These bellowing blubbering chattering blabberers, they are even now bringing on a New Reality. In which Maginot Lines of fear-crazed donut-bellied uzi-bearing gendarmes will be stationed many blocks from the White House. Manning checkpoints where citizens will be stripped bare physically and psychologically. Before they will be allowed to proceed to the wee mansion, where the wee puppet, the wee president, does weely play.

“Safety,” uber alles.

I wandered through the White House once. I learned, some time later, that my wander occurred on the very day that, somewhere above, Bill Clinton, at the climax of a fine blow-job, spurted his seed upon Monica Lewinsky’s fine blue dress.

I for sure understand that there is a certain charge in spraying one’s semen upon the clothing of one’s lover. I have been there myself.

But I also understand that, if on that day Monica Lewinsky had swallowed, there would have then been no semen-stains upon the blue dress. And said dress would not later have been snatched by false Lewinsky friend Linda Tripp and transported to the puritans of Kenneth Starr, for DNA testing. And, lacking proof of the ceaseless peregrinations of The Clenis, there would have been no Impeachment. And so in 2000 the fumbler-bumbler but basically good-heart Al Gore would easily have defeated the alcoholic no-brain “I Gotta Be A War President, And A Meaner Sum’Bitch Than My Daddy” George II. And so there would have been no 9/11. Because Gore would have Paid Attention to the babbling munchkins of Al Qaeda. Which Clinton I had done. And which George II refused to do. Because Clinton I had. And so, we would not, all over the world, be where we are now. In a really rather rough patch of Hell.

Once upon a time I was going to write a travel guidebook to Washington DC.

(That’s why I was there. In the White House. While Clinton I was spurting semen onto Monica’s dress.)

As it developed, I didn’t possess the requisite ego, or hubris, to complete such a book project.

Before I (wisely) abandoned said project, however, I accumulated many nuggets of useless wisdom.

Among these, included stories of how, and why, and when, in the early days of these United States, people used to easily weave into the White House, and all the time.

I particularly remember the tale of a clot of inebriated backwoods darn-diggy cheesemakers who one night awoke Andrew Jackson as they attempted to roll through the White House doors a giant wheel of rotting cheese.

Now Andrew Jackson was a volatile and violent man—he routinely whipped his slaves and wanted all the Indians in America savagely put to sleep and he would occasionally pass his days killing people in duels and once he memorably slaughtered hundreds of Britishers several weeks after all hostilities between his nation and the UK had ceased.

But when the cheese-men weaved into his house—the White House—Andrew wrapped round him his robe, descended the stairs, joined his bibulous visitors in a round or nine of grog, thanked them muchly for their curds and whey, and then sent them merrily, satisfied, on their way.

“Mr.” Obama, he who is the black curtains in the white room of the White House, in my opinion, he owed it to Omar Gonzalez, to meet with him.

After all, Omar Gonzalez had spent much of his life dutifully killing people, for the various occupants of the White House. Obama. Bush II. Clinton I.

On behalf of all his fellow figureheads, Obama should have, I think it only fair, congratulated Omar Gonzalez, on a job well done.

Then Obama could have patted Omar Gonzalez on the head. And sent him back to live in his car.

And if he was feeling particularly generous, he might even have advised Omar Gonzalez to try to live as he—Barack Obama—lives. Comfortably numb.

Before the racist misogynist plagiarist Quentin Tarantino snapped him up for Pulp Fiction, John Travolta was languishing in such uber-embarrassing filmic horrors as The Devil’s Rain.

I watched that thing several times: because I was deep in the mountains; the time was eons before cable, much less the tubes; I had stems-and-seeds marijuana; and there was but one TV channel to ride, when I wanted to come down, before dawn, from psychedelic interstellar rides; and that one channel perversely, oft-times repeated, this Devil’s Rain ridiculousness.

The plot and such of the film, these are not important.

What is important is that, in the end, in a cleansing rain, all the bad people’s faces melted.

Wilfred Owen, a little bit before his body got sliced and diced for no reason by machine-guns, wrote: “All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful.”

That was 98 years ago, he wrote that.

And so: so sorry, but I just am no longer willing to shit in my own mouth.

Hope you understand.

When a nation reaches a place where bibulous citizens cannot some midnight drunkenly wheel a mammoth round of cheese into the chief executive’s residence, without fear of being throat-ripped by dogs or head-shot by sharpshooters on the roof, then that nation is over.

Apparently a bunch of well-meaning but clueless smoothbrained wankers this past weekend whined to the skies about climate change by assassinating the climate in leaping aboard climate-murdering cars and trains and jets to obscenely congregate in the climate-destroying filth of cities to there accumulate fetid mounds of climate-choking garbage as they belched slogans and waved signs around that no one will pay attention to and that will make no difference to anyone whatsoever.

Reason #348697/.h76(a) why intelligent life-forms from other worlds do not make themselves manifest on this planet.

Instead, they could have gone, all of these people, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And, there, following the lead of the true American hero Omar Gonzalez, they, one by one, could have loped across the lawn, to the White House. There to seek an audience with the president. To tell him that the atmosphere is collapsing. And that the president needs to get this Word out to the People. They could have kept this up. All these hundreds of thousands. One by one. Until the Word was not only Received, but Heeded.

Or until there was no president. And no United States.

Of thee I sing.

Tizuvthee, Old Soapy, land where Thoreau sat and Whitmanwalked, despised of all nations, Strontium, alone.

I write along a single line: I never get off it. I said that you were never to kill anyone, and I meant it.

—Kenneth Patchen

You’re killing now. “Mr.” Obama. Killing brown people. Brown like you. And you no longer have any excuse. This time, you can not blame any others. You are killing, this time, because you yourself have chosen to kill.

I told you I meant it. About the killing.

You, apparently, didn’t give a shit.

And so now, in turn, I don’t give a shit, for, about, you.

In fact, I spit at your feet.

And then I turn and walk away.

You are dead to me.

Go collapse in the corner, huddle, in cuddled shame, with the other bloodmouths and butchers. Such a disgrace, you are. Butcher. Killer. Disgrace.

Howdy Doody. Amos & Andy. You. Are all the same.

Forget I everknew you. For it’s same as it ever was. There in the White Room. You: just black curtains.

Whoever lives two or three generations, feels like the spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if he remains seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times. As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

This is where I came in.

A Democratic president, trying, domestically, to do his best, but he could not. Even as, and out of his control, the nation’s domestic police run amok; and, likewise beyond his control, the nation’s foreign police, running amok, thrust their greasy, slimy hands, into all and every orifice, domestically.

As, overseas, the Democratic president, mad as Lear, seeks to bomb, even as he restrains; seeks to restrain, even as he bombs. Clueless. With, nowhere, alive, to lay upon him a true and healing hand; nowhere, alive, any Cordelia.

Where I came in, into political consciousness, in this country, on this planet, was when the Democratic president was Lyndon Johnson.

Today, it is this Barack Obama person.

Today, this Barack Obama person, projectile-vomiting, running out of his ass, bleeding out of his very eyes, some sort of unutterable burstbrained ebola about some outfit nobody can even attach a consistent name to: ISIL, ISIS, IS.

No matter. The dudes—even if we don’t know their name—they are fucking Evil Incarnate! Shooting up ships in the Gulf Of Tonkin and blowing up the Maine and bayoneting babes in Belgium and masturbating like monkeys all over pictures of The Queen! They’re freakin’ worse than even Emmanuel Goldstein! Hitler! Stalinmaosaddamosama! Beelzebub! The very Luceiferian lightbringer hisself!

And the Lord said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

—Job 2:2

They’re walking up and down in it—all the fucking world!—these Hitlers, these Commies, these Cong, these Lucifers, these Islamists, these terrorists, these beheaders, and so the US of A—USA! USA! USA!—must now, so it is soberly intoned, war, war, and war again, war world without end, amen.

Fuck you. Fuck that. It’s all the same as it ever was.

Only real difference is, this time, they fashioned, to shuck the jive, a dusky sort of golem, to paint it black.

Last time, when it became clear no one with a functioning brainpan could any longer live with, much less stomach, Lyndon Johnson, they rolled out the jabbering dipshit Hubert Humphrey.

This time—ye gods!—they are salting the earth with Clinton II. Who makes Humphrey loom like Stonehenge, compared to Clinton II’s Cardiff Giant.

It’s just foolish, people.

As Neil Young once said:

you’re all just pissingin the windyou don’t know itbut you are

and there aint’ nothin’ like a friendwho can tell youyou’re just pissin’ in the wind

Trying to change move redirect elevate any of this nonsense, from inside the nonsense, is futile.

My friend Zack used to say: “My advice to you is to take your books, and get to the shelter.”

Absolutely goddam right.

George Orwell put it this way: “The whole thing is so utterly insane that it just sickens me. Eileen and I have decided that if war does come the best thing will be to just stay alive and thus add to the number of sane people.”

Beunaventura Durriti said, truly: “We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”

Let it grow. Meanwhile: get out of the way. Of the blast and the ruin. Step out of line. Reject. Fade away. Evade every tendril of the madness. And, in a world—a universe—of your own: let it grow.

I am so full of love. It bleeds from every part of me. It is more than all the waves that have ever been upon the ocean. It could encompass all of you. And it is refused. Crabbed, rejected, inward. All you all. Every night, the pain increases. From the spurning. I am here, of dark matter, of desire. Of love. Every night, I decrease. Each morning, I try again to build. I am so full of love. It bleeds from every part of me. It is more than the waves upon the ocean. I crack into pieces, from want; I collapse, I crack, into nothing. I am of nothing. Every night, the pain it increases. I am nothing. From the spurning. I am here, of dark matter, of desire, in love. I am so full of love. It bleeds from every part of me. I am so full of love. I am nothing. From the spurning. I am gone all. All gone, in love, away.

Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so. Heigh ho. It has always been so.

Currently, the bird, a toddler. Somewhere between one and two years old.

And, such birds, they commonly live for 60 to 75 years. And they bond. These birds. Intensely. So she—the bird—expects me to live as long as she will. And, if I don’t, it’s a betrayal.

I never, previously, in all my long and wandering life, had any interest, at all, in what they call, in the trade, “big birds.”

Intellectually, I was sporadically—many years between the sporads—amused by the idea of parrots who live to be 200-300 years old.

Who—or so it was said—would recite words from out of Ben Franklin’s mouth, a couple centuries onward.

And even this, I know now, was occasioned—like far too much in my life—only by the obviously raving lying words of the serial lie-spewer Hunter S. Thompson.

Who, in his tome Generation Of Swine, mendaciously wrote:

Reagan is older than most parrots, which can live about 200 years.

My friend Cromwell, down the road, has a huge mottled green bird that still squawks “Off with their heads,” a dim memory from the time of Madame Defarge and the madness of the French Revolution. The filthy, ageless animal was hatched in the slums of Paris and came over on a boat with a servant who was indentured, at the time, to Benjamin Franklin.

It is weird to stare into the crazy black eyes of a savage yet well-spoken old bird who can remember snatches of conversation between Ben Franklin and Aaron Burr, and sometimes even George Washington. You never know for sure, with these beasts, but lying is not in their nature and most smart people take them seriously. When the thing starts screeching and babbling about a thunderstorm over the Hudson River on Wednesday night in 1788, it is probably telling the truth.

Nobody knows what it means. Old Ben had a queer sense of humor, but he definitely understood the weather. Thomas Jefferson kept ferrets, which gnawed on his body at night, and eventually poisoned his blood.

Intellectually, I am in absolutely no doubt that all of Thompson’s musings here on parrots are pure balderdash, of the same unadulterated horseshit as his inspired hallucination of ferrets poisoning Jefferson’s blood.

I can, for sure, these days, recognize such “lying” Wrongness, for I have, and many times, engaged in such Thompsonesque raving lying, myself.

There is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

And that is why, at this moment, I am sitting here—I, ridiculous—with this supremely satisfied cockatoo on my shoulder: serene, happy, calmly preening herself.

Because I, in ecstatic truth, “lied” myself, right into her life.

When I first met her, she cried every day like a baby. Because that’s what she was.

She’d had—like all the hurt hardest farthest people—a rough start.

There’d been a hole inadvertently burned in her crop—food too hot in a feeding—and so she needed to be fed every two hours, and only on soft baby food. The owner of the feed-and-pet store, satanically located right across the street from me, nonetheless a wonderful woman, who for decades had recurrently hand-raised these big birds, so they’d be socialized, friendly, for their future people, she had to leave off caring for her, the wee bird, because her own partner, her husband, had been taken by a cancer. It was he she needed to tend.

So her assistant managers next took on the job. And, with them, this bird learned to always be cuddling with a person. Always in contact. That’s what she Learned was Normal.

Until she had grown and recovered enough, and so went into a store cage; and, making matters worse, was no longer fed solely on the baby food.

And so, from her, from that moment on—the exile into the cage, the removal of the favored food—there was, constant, a Complaint.

Which is where she caught my eye, and ear, and heart. That’s when I met her. In the Complaint.

Because I am a sucker, on this planet, for heart-felt crying sounds of Complaint.

So she directly got my attention. In calling, so pitifully, for the baby food. As the store-people were striving mightily to wean her off it. I couldn’t give it to her. Though I wanted to. But I couldn’t. Because I was not of the store people. But she vibed that I would. If I could. Give it to her. The baby food. The Love.

And so, even after she left off begging the store people, in her special screeching-dying-bird-dinosaur strangling baby noise, for the baby food, she’d lay it on me. That I should feed her. What she wanted. And needed. The baby-food. The Love.

I was seeing her every day now. Because there was something about her.

Beyond the baby-food. There was something about her.

This demonic hellbroth of a store had sucked me into coming into the place the previous Halloween when in a raffle they’d decided I “won” a terrarium. Which meant I had to put something in the terrarium. So, I subsequently bought, from them, a bearded dragon. Which meant I had to go their place every day to buy for the dragon crickets to devour. And, to get to the crickets, I had to go to the room where the bird was. So I saw her. Every day. And she saw me.

And shortly after—after months and months—she’d at last given up on the baby-food noise, I was standing there talking to the bird, through the bars, when a demonic store-woman popped the latch to the cage, and said, “here, take her around.”

Cage-door opened, the bird walked upon my hand, and from there crawled up my arm to my shoulder. And we then proceeded to promenade. All about the store. A disturbed old/young couple.

And promenade, so did we, every day, about the store, every day, for the next six months.

I suppose it was rude. Presumptuous. That every day I would go in there and pop the latch to her cage and take her out and stride round with her. But since that first store-woman had given me the okay, that one day, I figured on every day it was okay. And nobody there every said it was Wrong.

But we could never be together. Not for good. Because I would have to “buy” her. And her “price” was insane. At least for a person in the place of me. Especially, me, trying, belatedly, to become frugal. Recognizing the autumn of life. And—trying—to at least think about putting aside money for stuff like doctors and operations and stretcher beds. And her price was insane. Even for “big birds.” Elevated beyond even the usual insanity level because she be a mix of “umbrella cockatoo” (pretty much universally regarded as an animal kept only by the insane), and an “eleanora cockatoo” (which was only recently recognized as a subspecies, when spotted in a zoo), and such mixes—I guess they doan wanna much fuck one another—are generally impossible to achieve.

There was no way I could sanely justify a purchase of this person.

Despite the fact that for months she had become of my daily bread.

For I needed instead—sanely, responsibly—like, a computer. For I am typing—here, still, today—on a machine literally of the last millennium. Needing, too, like, a bed. Needing, also, oh, you know, to get my car fixed. So that it, like, runs.

So I’d resigned myself to the fact that Bella—that the bird’s name: full name Bella Nora, for “umbrella” and “eleanora”—would be a girl who got away.

Alas.

Not the first man, would be me, who lost a girl, because of money.

Then I go over there, across the street, to the feed store, one morning, and the store people are in a tizzy, because some moneydripping woman they had never seen before had come in and met Bella, and decided she just had to have her, but she didn’t at that moment have her checkbook with her, but said she would return with it in two days, and at that time snap up Bella, and an appropriate cage.

They were grieving, these feed-store people. Because they thought I wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye. To Bella. And they thought that it was I who should really have her. Bella. Because, like, she was my girlfriend.

Like a typical stoic feelingless asshole guy, I went in and said goodbye to Bella. But only because I really didn’t believe it was goodbye.

For I immediately went home and put out a powerful negative force-field. To ward off whoever was this unconscionable animal who thought she could just swoop in, and just because she had money, make off with my girlfriend.

Several months before, two couples, I was then by the feed-people informed, were trolling Bella. Thinking of buying her. And I zapped them then with negative energy, to repel them right off my bird-woman. And this, it worked.

So that I did again. For this latest ghastly intruder.

I meanwhile wrote, in email, my friend, about the impending (alleged) sale of Bella to the Wrong Woman.

This friend had initially scorned Bella as “like a high-maintenance Italian girlfriend.” Concluding that Bella was supreme folly. And that, if I bought her, I would be a person who should be put into a Home.

But my friend had lately softened. Not only in observing how Bella and I interacted, but in her own perception of Bella as a being.

Too, my friend, unbeknownst to me, was, at that moment, going through a medication crisis.

She was, in fact, my friend, due to this medication crisis, and, as she only later admitted, at that moment, in a place where she was actually insane.

Which is why she stated that she would put on her credit card the money that I did not have at that moment in my possession, necessary to complete the purchase of Bella.

She further decreed that she and I must proceed at once to the store and purchase Bella, before the horrific intruder woman did likewise.

So, that’s what we did.

And so, Bella, she lives here now.

Of course, Bella is a toddler. And toddlers require a certain level of attention. But I have been through that. With the deviant daughter. And it is okay. Not an insurmountable problem. And she has settled, Bella, so serenely into this place. Like it’s where she wanted to be all along.

As for me?

How fucking much coincidence can you have, until you realize there are no coincidences, when the watch-poem for your life, for more than thirty years, has been:

I saw myselfa ring of bonein the clear streamof all of it

and vowedalways to be open to itthat all of itmight flow through

and then heard“ring of bone” wherering is what a

bell does

When I was a kid, and readThe Once And Future King, my favorite was Merlin, and I thought it was so cool, that he knew all about all the animals, and that he had an owl, always on his shoulder.

Today, I would still be Merlin, I try to know all about the animals, and I have, on my shoulder, this dizzy yearning bird, Ms. Bell, the Bellerbee, still but a baby, but who will grow into who knows what Power.

You know what?

In this, once again, in my life, comes proof, that the universe is good.

And, therefore, I can say, in perfect confidence, to you, that it’s good for you too; and therefore it’s all, it’s all, all gonna be, alright.